prohibition and speakeasies - a writer's snapshot of the 1920's and alcohol

Prohibition, the 18th amendment, created bootlegging and speakeasies. As most everyone familiar with the roaring 20s knows, it was a time where everyone drank, despite the 18th amendment, and bootleggers made millions. Prohibition was repealed, obviously, since we can sell alcohol with a proper license.

In truth, prohibition laws had too many holes in them to work. These gaping holes included selling alcohol to pharmacies and priests. These holes were abused frequently. If you read The Great Gatzby you will see a shining example of this, because Gatzby was a pharmacist who sold these "prescriptions" (according to the law, that's what he was doing). Believe it or not, some priests did share with their congregations. The holes were there because the law wouldn't pass without these holes. Frankly, prohibition shouldn't have passed at all because all it did was make drinking go underground and become fashionable.

Now, we're onto the topic of speakeasies. If you've heard of the Stork Club or Cotton Club, you know the name of a speakeasy that survived until after the 18th amendment was repealed. Major celebrities went to speakeasies to drink and party, including Babe Ruth (who drank quite a lot). Most of what people there drank was bathtub gin.

To make bathtub gin (don't do this at home!) you ferment a mash of potatoes, corn sugar, fruit, or beets in a still, which produces 200 percent alcohol. You mix that with glycerin and a touch of juniper oil for taste. You then water this down by half, using your bathtub ( a sink was too small). I repeat, Do Not Do This At Home! For some to even tolerate this, it was mixed with pops, juices, and fruits. You couldn't, or shouldn't drink that straight.

After I just gave you that recipe, I feel the need to say it again. Don't Make Bathtub Gin! Cocktails were necessary because it tasted so bad and you'll kill your stomach trying to. You can buy good stuff from a store and drink responsibly and legally, instead, so do that.

Law enforcement had a nightmare dealing with what I just explained above, and so did anyone who sold alcohol of any kind (rubbing, paint thinner, etc.). The US government would add wood alcohol to make products including alcohol in the ingredients impossible to use for bootlegging. Gangsters tried to boil it out, but it wasn't completely successful. 50,000 people died of tainted alcohol during prohibition. To deter drinkers, the US government also added more of this chemical, kerosene, and pyridine.

Moral of this story, drink responsibly and enjoy your freedom to drink. And, in case you forgot, Don't Make Bathtub Gin!

Comment about what you want to hear about and God bless!

http://www.heartlandbrewery.com/inside-the-speakeasies-of-the-1920s/

http://prohibition.themobmuseum.org/the-history/the-prohibition-underworld/bootleggers-and-bathtub-gin/

The 1800s - a basic snapshot

The 1800s was a time when, to put it bluntly, you had to do everything yourself. Factories and buying your clothes and food wasn't an option (for most of the time period). Towards the 1900s clothes in factories were an option, but early 1800s you made them yourself.

Usually, my blog posts involve detective work and laws, with some exceptions, but today I am branching out into time periods because some writers write historical novels. You could, most definitely, create a detective from the early or late 1800s. I'm going to give you a basic snapshot of what 1800s life was like.


In my research, I have found that early and late 1800s are different situations. I am going to be talking about the early 1800s. According to iamcountryside.com, it is suggested that you ask the Amish about their homesteading life if you want to know more about the late 1800s.

Daily Life

The first paragraph said it all: you do everything yourself, unless you were rich. If you were wealthy, you paid someone else to do it. Your kids worked alongside you and most were only educated to 8th grade. If you had money, they could be educated further. Handmade was the standard and when factories came around, some of these people lost their living (in the late 1800s, I mean). 

Homes were heated with fireplaces. The wealthy had bed curtains, and brick houses with floors and windows (think Scrooge's bed, but in a brick house with less fancy linen), but others had cabins with dirt floors. "Cabin Fever" is carbon dioxide poisoning because the door wasn't open enough and you had no windows. 

Gender differences were huge in this era. Women were married off via courtship, most were only educated to the 8th grade, and they were taught mostly homemaking. They were not encouraged to work, but homemaking was so different then that homemaking alone was work. Courtship was a time of freedom because they could reject and accept whomever they wanted and didn't have the responsibilities of running a household. After courtship, that power was over. 

Men, on the other hand, were taught to be breadwinners and support the household with their income. They looked for a woman who could take care of the home while they worked all day. Also, someone who could give them children. They courted in their late teens, same as women.

 I say this as a summary of the society standard, but I'm sure there were some out there who broke the mold, on both male and female standards. Men had simple expectations. I'd say, for this time period, that women did, too, because everyone was working constantly wherever they were. Life was hard in the early 1800s. 

One last thing I'll touch on in this section is self-care and hygiene. Take away the modern medicines, vaccines, showers, bathing daily, and extra hair and body care products we have today. Make opium legal again and make herbs the main medicines to cure ailments. Make it common to take one bath per 1 month and make your bathtub a wooden tub with all the family's bathwater still in it (if you aren't the head of the family). Also, you'd be using homemade lye soap and making it yourself with animal fat. You only wash your hands and face daily, in a small bowl of water. Are you there in your imagination? Do you feel disgusting and want to shower with your bath and body works shower gel and wash your hair with silky conditioner? Yeah, me too. 

What happened in this time period?

This was the time period of railroads, politics and presidents, and many other exciting events. Here are just a handful that happened (see http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1800s.html for more). 

-the invention of the battery (1800) -library of congress  (1800) -West Point Military Academy (1802)

-ultraviolet radiation discovered (1801) -Ohio became the 17th state in the union (1803)  

-New Jersey abolishes slavery (1804)  -first working locomotive (1804)  -first Oktoberfest (1810)

-Pride and Prejudice (1813)  -Battle of waterloo (1815)  -the rosetta stone (1822) 

-first photographs (1826)

There's so much more on the link above. It was hard to pick just a handful. A lot of inventions and discoveries happened in this era. 

Religious and societal beliefs of the time

Last, but not least, I'd like to introduce you to what the hot topics were of the 1800s. 

Mormons began in 1830 and headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. We know them now as people that have more than one spouse and come to your door with pamphlets. That isn't true of all of them, but that's the expectation we get from the musical The Book of Mormon, a musical that makes comedic relief of Mormon beliefs. 

The 1800s hot topics included abolition (opposing slavery), temperance (best explained as alcohol = evil), and social reform. Many names were connected with abolition, like William Lloyd Garrison,  the Grimke Sisters, and Frederick Douglas. At this time, some of the women's movements were beginning, as well, and these women also supported abolition. Other reforms involved school systems, headed by Horace Mann, and treatment of the mentally ill, headed by Dorothea Dix.  

I hope this has been informative and useful. If you want more information, I'm putting the rest of my sources below. This topic is also explored by many historical villages, such as Roscoe Village, which is where I picked up some of this. As always, check my facts and keep me accountable, writers. I aim to write truth. 

https://sites.google.com/site/ibcinthe1800sandhowtheychanged/

https://www.history.org/history/teaching/enewsletter/volume7/mar09/courtship.cfm

https://morsesociety.org/cpage.php?pt=11

https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/stories/how-fast-could-you-travel-across-the-us-in-the-1800s (the picture)

Saint Olga of Kiev - intelligence and power

Saint Olga of Kiev is a name few know. I only heard about this woman, the patron saint of widows and converts, last week.

Olga of Kiev was widowed after her husband, Igor I of Kiev, was assassinated by the Drevlians in a terribly gruesome way. The tribe that killed him then sent a marriage proposal to her and she accepted- or so it seemed.

(I'm sure you're wondering why this is important to writers and mystery/suspense fans about now. Well, here comes the violent part, so you can stop wondering.)

She sent for a party of men from the proposing tribe to celebrate the marriage with her, then buried them alive in a pre-dug ditch while she asked them loudly whether this was honorable enough for them. If this wasn't violent enough, she then set up a bathhouse and invited a party to join her there. She locked them in and burned them alive. 

About now you're probably wondering if this can get worse for the tribe who assassinated her husband, and it can. 

She declared that she wanted a banquet to honor her fallen husband and grieve for him just once more before she wed the other tribe's prince. Once there, she did grieve for her husband. During the meal, she got the tribe drunk and ordered her men to kill everyone there, egging her men on as they did so. 

Even after she had done all this, it wasn't enough. She held their village under siege, then offered them a way out: a few pigeons and a dove. They were delighted, gave her exactly that, and went on their way thinking everything was going to be okay. She had sulphur tied to the birds, lit the sulphur, and set the whole place on fire by sending the birds home. She took survivors as slaves. 

She continued to avoid remarrying to save the throne for her son, and she was successful in this. When her husband had died, her son had been three years old, thus wasn't ready to rule. 

Why was this woman a saint?

After what you just read, the question above must be somewhere in your thoughts. Believe it or not, this woman brought Christianity to Russia and the Constantine Empire. She successfully converted a great many of her subjects to Christianity, but wasn't so successful with her son. 

She had great intelligence and wit in avoiding proposals, and great power that, once she accepted Christ, was used for good. What she did before her conversion may have been anything but Christ-like, but she genuinely accepted Christ and became a saint. 

Why is she important to readers and writers out there? For one thing, as a Christian, it comforts me to know that if God can forgive this woman, he has plenty of grace to offer us. 

For another thing, it's good to remember that your characters are not static and should not remain static, if you want them to appear realistically in the readers' minds. It isn't impossible for real people, like Olga of Kiev, to make an abrupt change in their lives. This simply illustrates that it can be realistic for a character to be ruthless in one part of the book and change as the book goes on.

What do you want to hear about, fellow writers and readers? I aim to please, so comment below. 

Inspired by Chicago - The truth in the satire

The musical Chicago is a famous, favorite musical. It may interest many to know that Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart were real people, but had different names. The woman reporter who covered these events wrote the show Chicago as a satire and wanted us, as the audience, to hate the characters portrayed. They weren't written to be related to, at all.

Maurine Watkins, 28,  wrote about Belva Gaertner (Velma Kelly) and Beulah Annan (Roxie Hart) as if they had been guilty and played the system. She was put on the murderess row beat because it was too boring for the men, apparently. Murder, boring? Ha!

What you have to know about a reporter's access to jails was that they had 24-hour access in 1924. They competed with police to solve crimes, in their minds. Watkins would go in acting like what they used to call a "sob sister". As a result, they talked to her and she could use their words against them.

Sob sisters were a way of playing the system and creating sympathy for the woman trying to get off for murder, rather than sympathy for victim. The "sob sister" would become upset over the "wrongly jailed woman", creating press coverage that made the woman look good to a jury. Think Mary Sunshine, if you need an illustration of this.

Another thing to note, in this time period in Illinois, was that all male juries were the, stubbornly common, normal. The Victorian ideal that women didn't become violent, but only became that way for good reason, was alive and well here. This created an easy way to play the jury, by being a weak looking female to get off for murder.

Belva Gaertner

She was a cabaret singer and divorcee, and a woman who was possessive of her men, dangerously possessive. Unlike the musical portrayal, she didn't do a double homicide. She shot Walter Law in her car after a cabaret gin party and claimed to remember nothing, except hearing an explosion and feeling him fall on her.  Belva Gaertner and William Gaertner divorced multiple times and it was he who divorced her for abuse the last time. Thus proving that women can be abusive, too. 

Beulah Annan

This one was almost the same as the musical, pregnancy claim and all. Except for one thing; she changed her story three times. 

She shot her lover Harry Kalstedt, whom she met while working as a book-keeper. Afterward, she left her husband's phonograph playing for hours, then finally called her mechanic husband to say she killed a man. She divorced her husband, whom she had used as a meal ticket, directly after the trial on grounds of desertion. She had faked a pregnancy for sympathy and broken down in front of the jury in the course of the trial. 

Her first story about the crime was that his advances caused her to shoot to defend her honor. The story morphed into him leaving and her shooting him for leaving. The story she settled on was self-defense. "They both reached for the gun", which was said at the actual trial and made into one of Billy Flynn's featured songs in the musical. 

What ultimately happened

These two women were acquitted, but did I even need to tell you these women were let off the hook? If you watched the musical, no, but I say it for the benefit of those who don't know. 

Annan died of tuberculosis at age 29. Gaertner lived to the ripe old age of 80 and lived with her sister after her husband died in 1948. 

As usual, check my facts and keep me posted on what you want to hear about. I aim to arm writers with truth and history.

Informants, legal informants

Informants are legal, first of all. They confidentially provide information to law enforcement agencies. Yes, they can get paid, but that is the minority. Most got caught doing something and complied with a sting operation (being undercover) to get leniency or charges dropped.

One thing to remember with this topic is that their identity is protected unless they are called as a witness in court. Also, to be a legal informant, many things are considered. Some of this is common sense to an investigative mind, but some aren't. Below is a simple list of what is considered.

1. age
2.alien status
3.are they party to privileged info?
4. relevance of info
5.relationship to anyone involved
6.ability of officer to ensure they only do what they are supposed to / how they would use legitimate organizations for info
7. motivation
8. various risks to case
9. can statements be backed?
10. reliable/truthful?
11. prior record as witness
12. criminal history
13. risk of flight or harm to general public?
14. substance abuse.
15. relative in law enforcement?
16. harm to self/family if inform?


When it comes to legal informants, the pre-chosen (a common example is drug buying) crime is pardoned so they can be undercover and help bust someone. If they do what was pre-arranged well they receive their leniency, charges are dropped, or they are paid. It's rather simple compared to some legal concepts. It's a deal made with law enforcement, at its most basic.

It is equally important to note that private investigators don't get this legal privilege and don't have the regulation law enforcement agencies have. Law enforcement and PIs aren't the same. They may have helpful sources on the side, but they aren't called informants in that situation.

Check my research. Keep me honest, fellow writers. I aim to educate you with the truth. When you write your informants to life, keep in mind the paid are the minority and there are laws to follow when using them. I can only put so much in one blog post, so if you want to hear more, comment below. 

Court Evidence- is it admissible or not?

Investigators have to be aware of whether evidence is admissible in court or not. It is important to your story line and plot that you know what can and can't be used as evidence in a court of law. You have the power to make your characters win and lose court cases based on this information alone.

Admissible evidence is defined as being relevant, reliable, and obtained legally. Relevant means it must prove or disprove important facts in the case. Reliable means it is credible.

Basically, you can't have an illegally obtained recording, an unreliable video tape that's bad quality, or an irrelevant Facebook post as evidence. Any good lawyer would object to this evidence, but then again, does your lawyer character have to be a good lawyer? That's your call, fellow writers.

Inadmissible evidence is basically the opposite of what admissible is. It can't be used against anyone in court. Below I have listed some of the specifics of why it can be declared inadmissible (some have exceptions, so do your research on your specific circumstances):

prejudiced evidence
wastes time
misleading
hearsay (testimony outside of court)
character
expert testimony not from an expert
privileged information

What is evidence? Anything that can prove anything in court. Recordings, photos, testimony, statements, demonstrations, etc.... Keep in mind that if it is found to be illegally obtained evidence your private investigator or detective messed up, big time.

In conclusion, your private investigator or detective can throw a monkey wrench in their own case if they illegally collect their evidence (recordings without legal consent and shooting video on private property are just a few ways), so know your law and do your extra research. Check my facts, if you like. I aim to inform and arm writers with truth, so hold me accountable.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/inadmissible_evidence 
https://connorreporting.com/photo-video-evidence-always-admissible-court/ 
https://www.justia.com/criminal/procedure/admissibility-evidence/ 
https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/what-is-admissible-evidence.html 

Stalking- what is it according to the laws?

I've talked about how private detectives can be booked for stalking if they stake-out and tail people wrong. If you tail someone like detectives from noir movies your fictional investigator can get picked up for stalking, and the fictional police will laugh at your private investigator for their stupidity. What is considered stalking by law? Do you actually know? No matter what people claim it is, here are the facts when it comes to the actual (Ohio) laws.

Private Detectives (PIs) can be picked up because someone is scared and perceives a PI driving by their home or office as a threat. Tailing too obviously, and too often, has the same effect and therefore the police can pick up your fictional PI and put them in jail.

The laws on stalking/menace by stalking say that there is perceived threat (much like self-defense laws) of physical or mental harm. There is also a pattern of malicious behavior with the intention of intimidation. This can be cyber, too. Cyber is connected with sexual situations, commonly, and inciting someone to stalk/intimidate with a post or message of any kind is also menace by stalking.

The results of Stalking/Menace by Stalking

People can put in a civil protection order against someone who allegedly stalked them. To do this they can't be married to the person the order is against.  Civil protection orders state that the other person can't be within 500 feet of whoever filed the order. Breaking this order has penalties to the alleged stalker.

The first case of Menace by Stalking results in a misdemeanor in the first degree, and a second case makes it a felony of the fourth degree.

A case can be a felony of the fourth degree under these 9 circumstances (all except two apply to the alleged stalker):

-not the first time   -direct threat of physical harm  -trespassing  -the victim was a minor (under 18)
-history of violence -had a weapon -broke protection order  -prior to, was a danger to self or others
 -victim suffered harm on their own property at the hands of the stalker

What this means for  your fictional characters

As you can probably see, most stalking is involved with domestic abuse and domestic violence. As mentioned earlier, most cyberstalking has "sexual motivation", which is defined as a desire to satisfy sexual desires and needs, particularly for the offender.  For your fictional PI, or fictional character in general, they may fit the legal definition of a stalker, or not.

Given that most people don't know these legal definitions, "stalking" can be a term that is thrown around carelessly. "Facebook stalking", looking through people's profiles out of curiosity or boredom, is a term our society has used quite often, but legally if you tried to accuse someone of this it wouldn't hold water. Check me on that if you want. I personally think it wouldn't fit this definition because the malicious intent is, most likely, not there.

Your fictional characters, whether villains, heroes, victims, or wrongly accused neighbors, will be impacted by what you know about the law, especially in courtroom situations, so please check my facts. I invite you to correct me if I get something wrong. I aim to arm writers with correct information.


As always, comment what you want to know!